but incomplete, I think. Having a single "this is spam" checkbox isn't a bad idea in itself, but what if people decide to mark something as spam that isn't? The system as set up right now allows certain people (based on how they contribute) to vote to hide comments and to look at the comments others have hidden and vote to un-hide them if they feel the comments were unfairly hidden. However, this system only works if a people rate comments.

And as for the site growing and making it hard for me alone to delete garbage... well, I can give members editorial privileges as needed, so I won't always be alone :-)
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Who needs to be big and burly when you can just apply physics?
[ Parent ]

well, the two-column layout would stay I think - it is a good place for the necessary menus. I was more thinking of which of the parts could stay, which should go, and which could stand to be cleaned up and simplified.

I think adding a "recent diaries" list to the sidebar would help people find them. But that makes the sidebar even longer...

I miss the spell checking, now I actually have to write everything in an external window and do some work on it before posting. I think it is a good thing that it is broken.

hah! that argument sounds surprisingly like my argument for canning the edit queue. :-)

I usually suggest that sites should add features as they grow. Some features are seldom used when the information conent is manageable, other features are used by more experienced users. I like the idea of comment ratings, but I seldom use them, and with a small community they aren't needed as much as in a larger.

Well, I'm not sure how well I articulated this in the article. The main reason I kind of want to get more people rating comments is to build up a culture of rating comments appropriately, and not as a "reward/punishment" system that some people seem to consider it (*cough*k5*cough*). The more people used to rating comments, the less likely it is that a small group of active raters can misuse them in a meaningful way. And as the site grows, there will inevitably be a few members with an infantile sense of humour and way too much time on their hands.
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Who needs to be big and burly when you can just apply physics?
[ Parent ]

Please, please make headlines clickable

Done.

I think part of the problem is the number of comments and words in story parts, that information should be separate from the link to click,

That, unfortunately, is hard-coded at the moment. More and more of the page's output is configurable, but there's still a lot to go, and that's one of the pieces that hasn't been fixed yet. Right now, I can't change that line without changing the code behind the site, and there are other sites running from the same code - changing it for this site would look strange on the others... that's why I only recently changed the article voting to publish/abstain/reject - before this update, the vote options were hard-coded too.

Keep some kind of visible distinction for where one lead in stops and the next begin. As it is today it is great; but I've seen the latest trends where some sites don't keep it that distinct, as well as making the sizes of the headlines smaller.

I will. I totally agree with you here. The default actually had a line between the article header and the intro text below it, and no divider at all between the end of the intro text and the next article header. That just wasn't good.

I'll look at rearranging the header with some of the ideas you've put here.

The time format is another hard-coded thing. There seems to almost be a way to change the time format, since a format string is passed around in the code, but there is currently no way to change that. But I think the time zone marker should stay, if nothing else it reminds people if they haven't set their timezone preference yet...

And while I'd like the new members to be more active, there is a very typical 10x difference between active members and lurkers with accounts, and another 10x difference between lurkers with accounts and those without...

There's also the fact that the whole concept of a user-driven site is rather foreign to most people. It doesn't surprise me that most visitors will just read articles and that's it - most writing sites with articles on writing present those articles as references instead of discussion starters, and don't exactly encourage visitors to argue with the author!
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Who needs to be big and burly when you can just apply physics?
[ Parent ]

Well, there are a few things the abstain vote is good for, some not necessarily on this site though :-)

First, it lets you see accurately how many articles in the queue are actually new, because "new" is defined as "I haven't voted on it yet." If you don't want to either publish or reject a particular story, it will stay visible in that nice eye-catching red unless you vote to abstain. If you prefer, you can just not vote, and check the queue to see if that "new" article is actually new or if it's one you abstained from.

Second, if auto-post is used (which it isn't on this site) "abstain" votes are used when weighting the votes to determine if the story should be posted or not. Abstentions count slightly negatively, but not as much as votes to reject, because people who abstained didn't particularly want to see it published.

And third, it lets you see who all has voted on the story and how.

Flashiness should be reserved for sites that don't offer real content

I agree... rather, I have found that flashy sites rarely have content, so on seeing flashy design I already know what level of content to expect.

The layout won't be getting flashy, but it's been getting slowly cleaned up. Having a nice-looking site isn't the same as having a flashy one...

The only gripe that I have with the layout is that most text does not adhere to the font size I specify in my user configuration. [...] My assumption would be that this is due to the use of the stylesheets instead of <FONT> tags

Your assumption is correct. The font size preference that you're trying to set assumes that I'm using font tags all over, which I am not, using CSS instead. Since there are no font tags for the system to modify based on that setting, the font won't change. This is, I guess, a "historical" behaviour of the program, and is coming up in the list of things to fix. Hardly anybody used CSS when it was written, and nobody has gotten to it yet...

Actually, I'm pretty sure the main content text uses your default browser font and size. I'm a big fan of letting people set their own display, which is why the two columns scale with the size of your browser window, too.

I'm new to the site and have been reading through some of the older stories and am quite impressed.

I'm glad you've enjoyed your self-guided tour ;-)
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Who needs to be big and burly when you can just apply physics?
[ Parent ]

Font tags are bad and evil. I don't know what you are smoking if you believe stylesheets makes your fonts unreadable, it is the other way around. Stylesheets make fonts adhere to your size preferences and make them scalable. The FONT tag does the complete opposite (as does pixel sizes in stylesheets, I'll give you that).

For more information about proper use of stylesheets and html tags read the specs (of HTML 4.x and XHTML 1.x and CSS 1.x through 3.x) located at http://www.w3.org/ also look at sites which use stylesheets to demonstrate that they're okay, and fonts and tables are not.

That the font tag still is hailed in this day and age is beyond me, who on earth teaches these kids HTML tags? Pot bellied, pot smoking wannabees, is my guess.

As for the font-tags used on this site, Janra tells me that those will be ironed out in time, because of other issues, so I'm not going to bite in that direction today.

- Grumpy -
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When in doubt,
turn around,
cry and shout

spdyvkng - my homepage
[ Parent ]

All of those points you raised were things that kept me from just turning the edit queue off immediately.

Thanks for sharing your opinion though. Maybe in the future we might try the edit queue again.
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Who needs to be big and burly when you can just apply physics?
[ Parent ]